It’s November, 2007 and at my suggestion, my 12 year-old daughter, Mel, is busy shoving wads of toilet paper into her ear canals.
It’s her first rock concert, you see, and we’ve already walked 20+ blocks from the ferry terminal in downtown Seattle to a place called “Neumos” and here I went and forgot the earplugs.
Earplugs may sound sissy but, as my friend James, a veteran of hundreds of punk shows, taught me, they not only protect your ears but *improve* the sound. By cutting down on the inevitable sonic overload, definition is greatly increased. Also, having roomed with various musicians during early adulthood, I witnessed and have a definite disinterest in developing tinnitus.
And so I send my twelve year old daughter trotting off to the women’s loo to procure some makeshift canal wadding. Me? I’m just gonna have to grin and bear it.
We’re here to see Battles, a band I discovered via NPR’s “All Things Considered” program one afternoon. I was pulled in by the band’s interlocking rhythms, a reference to King Crimson as an influence, and the fact that they create music much the way I often have: overlaying different, polyrhythmic loops via a combination of sampling and live performance.
I’ve never been to Neumos before but it is just like the venues of my youth, places I saw bands like The Melvins and Mr. Bungle in: filthy, smelly, dank, dim, cramped, and crumbling. If you touch the place, it comes off on your hand. The walls are encrusted with posters, graffiti, and the dried remnants of biotal excreta. I think there must be a federal law prohibiting venues of this sort from any real maintenance – and too right. By the time a band gets to the stage that they can pull a truly nice theater, they’re no longer relevant as a rock act but rather just a pallid echo of one.
Much of the layout of the place remains a mystery to me because, after the walk and waiting for 30 minutes in the line that snaked around the building, we took up a stubborn residence at the left front corner of the stage while we still could. I’ve “seen” far too many shows from a vantage point that would have been greatly improved by just forgetting the whole thing and staying home and I don’t want Mel’s first experience to be like that.
The band is late, so we spend the time people watching while I disseminate pearls of concert going wisdom, which is a total laugh because I’ve been to so few shows, maybe 15 at that point. My sagacity is further belied by the revelation of the forgotten earplugs but, in her excitement, I don’t think my daughter notices. Phew: still a few more months of “cool” left in me.
Though scheduled for 8, the opening band – the now defunct Bronze Fawn – doesn’t hit the stage until 8:50, then works their way through a set of long, wandering, instrumental numbers. A competent, local, prog-rock group, their performance has my daughter begging me to buy her their cd. I shell out my remaining cash to the merch-maiden, then watch as the next band sets up.
By now I’m sort of miffed that I have to sit through two other bands I’ve never heard of to see the headliners. It’s this sort of thing that keeps me from going to more shows – and also points me out as a bit of an idiot.
As we stand waiting, a thin, pasty fellow walks out with a guitar case and begins setting up at the corner where we have parked ourselves. I watch him for a few minutes then comment to my daughter that he looks nervous, unsure of himself. Maybe he is the rhythm guitar player, newly drafted and fragile; his first show. I felt I could make him wince with a shout, he appears so unsteady and uneasy, on the verge of puking.
The guitarist is followed by a portly, grinning noodge – the drummer, of course – and a bearded, confident looking young man who tosses his long bangs out of his eyes as he makes the stage, a bass guitar hanging from his neck. The trio is Pleasureboaters, billed as a thrash band – what the hell are they doing sandwiched between two prog-ish groups?
For the second time of the evening we are assaulted by a sound check: kick drum thumps, chunky bass notes, twangy guitar tests. Then the wiry guitar player approaches the mike: “FUCK! SHIT! FUCK! SHIT FUCK!” Were I better parent I’d clamp my hands over my daughter’s ears and drag her the heck out of there – instead I just reflect on the fact that she hears worse daily in middle school and settle back to enjoy the spectacle.
A small knot of fans, many of them female and probably the band’s girlfriends, appear out of nowhere to gather to the right of us at the edge of the stage where they commence hooting, squealing, bouncing, and otherwise cheering the band on.
As the sound check continues, the bass player swaggers around his little corner of the stage, confidently making asides, while the drummer clowns on his stool, grinning like an eager schoolboy. Only the guitar player seems intent on the task at hand. What I first thought of as nervousness could be more of a steady concentration. As he continues to scream over our heads, his voice already cracking and ragged from strain, I can’t help but wonder: this is just the sound check, will he be able to keep this up?
Apparently prepared, the band launches into an energetic barrage of thumping, screaming – yet still hook-laden – pop-noise that takes those of us outside the know by surprise. I repeat: what the *hell* are these guys doing sandwiched between two prog groups?
Throughout the set, the singer/guitar player never stops twitching, thrashing, kicking, and flying around like a rag in a hurricane, all the while shrieking, moaning, and pouring himself directly into the microphone, the reverbing, gutsy thrang of his tortured telecaster reminding me at times of downtown New York, jazz guitarist Marc Ribot – albeit a Marc Ribot on a combination of acid and coke. How this kid keeps it together, playing, screaming, and twisting himself as if possessed, is beyond me. Underneath this chaos the solid, driving, and surprisingly adept rhythm section’s punchy competence holds everything together. The drummer never seems to stop grinning.
There is nothing particularly artful about the set. The band *attacks* the songs, their instruments, and, through their performance, the audience, as if their lives depend upon it. Most of us just stand there, mouths agape as the band screams through one number after another, pausing only a few seconds between each to gather its breath before renewing the assault. The pauses allow the bass player to utter observations and witticisms – the most memorable being directed at much of the crowd’s reaction to their set: “Those guys over there don’t know what the hell to think.”
He’s right. We are confused, taken aback. In general, we *hate* them. No matter how amazed I am at the lead’s ability to play, scream, and contort at once, they just don’t fit. We have come to see intelligent, controlled, nouveau prog played by bright young men in nice clothing as our main course and are being presented with a shrill, abrasive, and sweaty appetizer. I keep waiting for the singer to cough blood and collapse or crash, a la Kurt Cobain, into the flailing kit of the drummer but on they play, somehow both loose and tight at the same time.
After a forty minutes of this outrage, well over their allotted slot, the sound person shouts down from her perch that they need to end their set NOW but the bass player, like a naughty child, assures her only a few more songs remain and they launch directly into their next number before she can protest further. You have to laugh at the audacity.
Halfway through one of these last songs, the singer climbs gracelessly and tottering up onto the kick drum, brays like a gutshot mule in time to the music, then throws himself to the stage, miraculously not injuring anyone or the equipment. I look at Mel – she looks at me. The band’s like watching a building afire.
Soon enough it’s over and we’re standing around in shock waiting for Battles to get setup. Mel and I discuss the musical travesty we’ve just witnessed with knowing smirks while I gawp, goggle-eyed, at the far more famous personas setting up within touching distance.
Battles is introduced by an over-eager, Japanese fan, apparently traveling with them, who begs the crowd throughout the set in broken English to be more enthusiastic in our appreciation, to scream, dance, put our hands together, further damaging our ability to do so by making us conscious of ourselves and the lack of energy the band produces.
Not that they’re bad – they aren’t, they’re fascinating – but following a set like the one Pleasureboaters just delivered, their jouncy, art school, prog-pop seems a bit tepid and the venue’s acoustics turn their more nuanced intricacies into incomprehensible goo. Further, so much of what they create is accomplished by the members sampling a riff or two, then rocking along next to their workstations as the loops do much of the work. I swear, there are more Apples on stage than at your average roadside fruit stand.
Don’t get me wrong: the ability for four people to create and then synchronize so many different things at once – and in a live setting! – is no simple task but they make it look so and to their detriment. Only the drummer plays every note of his that you hear so, by the time their set is halfway over, the man is literally running with sweat while everyone else is still looking fresh and unrumpled in comparison. I feel sorry for him and hope he earns double what the other members do.
Afterwards, as we make our way back to the ferry, my daughter and I talk about the show. Mel enthuses about Bronze Fawn as she eagerly fondles her new cd but complains that she hadn’t been able to tell one Battles song apart from the other. Being more familiar with their music, I had an easier time but agree with her, speaking of my admiration for the band’s drummer and noting, with some surprise, my disappointment that so much of their sound is looped by computers, a fact I was well aware of before seeing the show but had never so clearly witnessed before. It adds immense layers to the band’s output and really isn’t a “cheat” in the grand scheme of things – but it sure *looked* like one.
Mostly, though, we complain about that middle band, Pleasureboaters. How out of place they were. How screechy they were. How ridiculous they were. How noisy, how crude, how torturous. Halfway up the funhouse-like ramp to the ferry terminal, I realize something and stop, turning to Mel:
“You know what? Pleasureboaters are the only one’s we’re really talking about.”
Mel stops and looks at me, skeptical, then nods with a little smile as the realization dawns on her, too.
“I think I need their cd,” I continue, suddenly mad at myself for not having picked one up at the show.
“Well, yeah, they were interesting,” Mel concedes, “but I don’t know if I liked them *that* much.”
But the more we think and talk about the evening, the more we focus on Pleasureboaters while the other bands fade from our mind.
The first thing I do upon arriving home is look up the show on Youtube in the hopes of hearing Pleasureboaters again. The recordings I find are unwatchable, distorted iphone travesties, so I track them down via their Myspace page and listen to the few tracks they have up. Oh, heck yeah. These guys are:unpretentious, uncompromising, raucous, and undeniably alive – plus there are hooks a plenty. This is the real rock and roll deal.
I order a copy of Pleasureboaters’ cd “¡gross!” and it remains one of my favorites – Mel’s, too. Thus my disappointment when, shortly thereafter while looking to see if they’re working on another album or playing any upcoming shows, I learn that they have broken up.
Why is it so many good bands last such a short time or only produce a few good albums before continuing to hang on well past their usefulness like so much overripe fruit? Liz Phair, Brad, Faraquet, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Roxy Music – it really does seem like a magnificent spark that has no tinder to catch beyond that of our ears. It is as if true music, the really magical stuff, is an animal that cannot survive in captivity, and yet the process of creating it is just that: boxing and caging this wondrous beast only to see it die from lack of freedom. Strike while the iron is hot, indeed.
I content myself with at least having seen them live, with having been jolted out of my staid, comfortable, little, middle-aged music world by their surprising and revelatory antics on stage. I have very little in my collection like them, as punk or thrash or whatever the hell it is they’re doing has never been to my liking – but the same can be said of many of the artists that make up the core of what I consider to be my favorite performers. I may not like the genres from which they spring – I hate the concept of genre in general – but oh, how I love what they bring to the form!
Trying to share Pleasureboaters with most friends and acquaintances is as pointless as trying to share Pere Ubu, Ruins, or Jandek. It doesn’t work. Noses turn up, eyes roll – once again I’m the guy with the broken radio, the guy with no taste, the weirdo … so what, I guess. It’s a suit I’m accustomed to.
In recent months I have been enjoying collecting records and, when I remember that Pleasureboaters album was released on white vinyl, I go to buy it and make a startling discovery: Ricky Claudon, Tim Cady, and Erik Baldwin are back together as Pleasureboaters. Both performing and supposedly working on another album.
GROSS!
Amateur video often doesn’t translate concert energy or sound very well – but this one‘s not so bad.
Pleasureboaters on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/plsrbtrs
